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Topic: 00 Flour (Read 5857 times)

I just received a big shipment of King Arthur Sir Lancelot and Italian (00) Flour. What kind of pizz is best for the 00 Flour? Neapolitan? If so, does anyone have any recipes they could recommend for using this flour? I'm anxious to give it a try.

I personally limit the use of 00 flour to Neapolitan style pizzas although I have played around from time to time with combining 00 flour with high-gluten flour in my efforts to try to reverse engineer the pizzas made by DiFara's in Brooklyn. I have also used doughs based on 00 flour to make pizzas within an hour, including the pizzas with eggs (see, for example, http://forum.pizzamaking.com/index.php?topic=637.0). I don't know which 00 flour you are using, but I find the Bel Aria and Caputo 00 flours to be the best for my purposes and 00 flour recipes.

There are several recipes for 00 doughs on this forum. For example, the basic recipe that I started with to make pizza doughs based on 00 flour (the Bel Aria brand) is posted on the thread "Help: Burned topping, pale crust", at Reply #12 (http://forum.pizzamaking.com/index.php?topic=705.0). An IDY version of that recipe, with other slight modifications, is posted at Reply #27 of the same thread and Reply #30 contains a link to a site (http://www.woodstone-corp.com/cooking_naples_style.htm) that has a recipe for using the Caputo 00 flour to make authentic Neapolitan style doughs. That recipe is for a large quantity of dough but I scaled it down to a single dough ball size (a bit over 7 oz.) that can be readily scaled upwardly by multiplying the amounts of ingredients for the single dough ball size by the number of dough balls desired. I have also converted the recipe to use IDY. Here is the ingredient list, along with baker's percents:

You may also want to take a look at the recipe posted and described in Replies #10 and 13 at the thread "question on "00" pizza flour" (http://forum.pizzamaking.com/index.php?topic=783.0). The recipe is one that was given to me by the importer of the Caputo 00 flour. You may also find the other postings at this thread of interest.

I first became aware of "equivalents" to 00 flour through the writings of Carol Field (The Italian Baker), Pamela Sheldon Johns (Pizza Napoletana! and CuisineAtHome.com), and Julia Childs. All three recommended a combination of pastry flour and all-purpose flour, and Ms. Johns also recommended a combination of cake flour and all-purpose flour. Often, these recipes were held out as being "authentic" Neapolitan pizza dough recipes. I suspect this was done since most Americans were unaware of the Italian 00 flour used by most pizza operators in Italy, and especially around Naples, and had no idea of where to buy the 00 flour. When I finally found out where to buy the 00 flour myself and to actually use it in the "authentic" recipes proposed by the above individuals, I became hooked on the 00 flour. I subsequently played around with other combinations of flours to try to emulate the 00 flour, including a combination of bread flour and pastry flour (which became my personal favorite of the 00 "equivalents"), and I even tried a combination of cake flour and vital wheat gluten. I was very surprised to discover that I could actually make a fairly decent pizza from that strange combination. All of the experiments I did with the various flours taught me that it was possible to make a good pizza using the "equivalent" flour combinations, even though I couldn't exactly replicate the 00 flour with such combinations.

I subsequently discovered that no cookbook writer is willing to put in a cookbook what I consider to be the truly "authentic" recipes for Neapolitan style dough. If you search the Internet for Italian 00 recipes based on 00 flour, you will find quite a few of them, an none ever calls for or hints of a combination of cake flour or pastry flour and other flours. But Ms. Johns, who lives in Italy and certainly is aware of 00 flour, doesn't have such a recipe in her book, and Peter Reinhart, who is also aware of 00 flour through his travels throughout Italy, doesn't call for it in his all-purpose flour version in his book American Pie. They both know that Americans won't try to hunt down 00 flour, so the readers of their books get second best. Fortunately for us at this forum, we don't have to settle for second best.

It doesn't sound like the KA "00" flour that I purchased is "authentic" and there are better 00 flours out there (or more authentic anyway). What is the recommended brand for 00 flour and where is the best place to purchase it? Pete, I know you had some opinions on specific brands of 00 flour. Where can I purchase these brands and which one is your favorite?

As best I can tell, there are about five different brands of 00 flour available in the U.S. at the retail level: Bel Aria, Delverde, Caputo, the KA 00 clone (which is really a domestic flour), and Pelegrino. I have tried all but the Pelegrino brand (which is available at isolaimports.com). I had problems using the Delverde and KA 00 flours in my recipes for Neapolitan style doughs, but good success using the Bel Aria brand. I haven't had much experience to date with the Caputo flour, which I received just recently, but it also looks to be a good product for my uses. The Caputo product is widely used by professional pizza operators in Italy and, to a lesser degree, in the U.S. The advantage that the Caputo product has over the Bel Aria product is that the Caputo 00 has a higher protein content (11.5-12.5%) than the Bel Aria 00 (which I am told is around 10%) and provides greater crust browning than a crust made with the Bel Aria 00 (although I have overcome this difference somewhat by using sugar and oil in the Bel Aria dough and oil on the shaped dough round).

The Bel Aria 00 flour is sold by the bag (1 kilo) in some retail shops, particularly in Italian neighborhoods, and also by Fresh Direct (at $1.49 a bag) if you happen to live in Fresh Direct's zip code service areas in NYC. The Bel Aria 00 is also sold by the bag ($1.99) by PennMac (at pennmac.com), and also in a ten-pack unit at a discounted per unit price if you call PennMac (1-800-223-5928; 412-471-5928) and ask for Rose and tell her you are a member of this forum. The Bel Aria ten-pack is also available from chefswarehouse.com, but only in the ten-pack case, for $12.42. Shipping costs also have to be considered so you should compare total price with shipping costs added to determine which offers the better deal. If you are not sure whether you will like the 00 flour and the pizza doughs it makes, you might want to try ordering a bag or two to test to see if it meets your needs. If you are also interested in other pizza-related products, such as San Marzano tomatoes and cheeses, PennMac offers a wide variety of such products that you might want to consider along with buying a few bags of the Bel Aria flour, if that's the way you choose to go. Remember also that PennMac sells many more products than shown at its website, so you may want to speak with Rose about specific product needs.

The Caputo 00 "pizza" flour is available at both PennMac and chefswarehouse, but only in a 25 kilo bag (55 lbs.). Fellow member jftaylor recently purchase a bag from PennMac at a good price (I believe it was better than chefswarehouse's price of $72.40, including shipping) by speaking directly with Rose. I have spoken personally with the NY-area importer of the Caputo 00 flour to see if there are smaller 1-kilo bags sold anywhere in the U.S. at the retail level and was recently given a possible lead, but haven't yet had a chance to follow up on the lead. Again, it would be nice to try out a small bag before committing to a 55-lb bag.